Reading...

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Tue, 16 Sep 1997 11:31:26 +0100

Good morning xmca!

This morning on the bus I finished Linnda Caporael's Psycoloquy article,
and thought that THIS time I'd try to get some of my reactions on-screen
before I rush on. (My current guilty feelings about reading include A)
still not having finished Cultural Psycology B) having read and appreciated
Jay's recently distributed chapter without articulating any feedback C)
ditto concerning David Dirlam's articles... I guess the situation sounds
familiar).

So, without reading the response sequence from Psycoloquy, here I go:

Section X. on Superordinate Coordination induced a BIG sigh of relief, as
it gave me a handle on the longstanding dilemma of how to approach the
phenomenon: "people don't do what they say they do". It has always pained
me how this is so dominantly treated in a NORMATIVE way in educational
research: people (teachers or students) SHOULD do what they say they do. Or
else they are either Hiding the Truth (because it looks bad) or they are
Cognitively Deficient (not smart enough to recognize the mismatch).

Linnda's evolutionary tracking of the genesis of humankind grounds this
phenomenon deeply in values of survival:

>46. The discrepancy between situated activities and their conventional
>descriptions allows perception and talk to function in the production of
>coordinated activity despite the novelty of every living moment.

and:

>47. Psychologists and philosophers have extensively debated the role of fol=
k
>psychology as an adequate or heuristically useful description of human
>cognition (Greenwood, 1991). However, the prescriptive content of folk
>psychology (e.g., the evaluative dimensions of trait terms) suggests anothe=
r
>interpretation. Folk psychological talk about beliefs, intentions, and
>desires
>-- including judgments concerning which are "natural" and which are not --
>develops a context for action that limits and entrains which actions are
>>conceivable, possible, desirable, essential, tolerated and forbidden.
>Folk
>psychology can serve for making heuristic predictions of behavior because,
>to some extent, it produces the behavior it predicts. The coordination
>involved >is not simply directing behavior (as in the sense implied by
>norms), but in its
>social cognitive construction.

Now, one of the tenets of folk psychology is -- surprise, surprise!! --
that there should be agreement between our words and our deeds. This is
what is natural and desirable...

=46or us as researchers, then, it seems VERY valuable to have this conceptua=
l
tool to mediate our work, lest we slip into the lukewarm comfort of
cultural monovision.

Eva
leaving it to people with other skills
to poke the holes in Linnda's argument